A key element to helping customers achieve business results is

assisting them in ways that strengthen them against their compe-
tition. Understanding marketplace challenges is crucial to helping
companies position against competition, since all companies in an
industry face these forces.

Insight

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How do these marketplace challenges affect
your customers?

See the Insight Guide on Marketplace Challenges inside The

Mind of the Customer Toolbox at www.mindofthecustomer

.com to help you assess the impact of these marketplace

forces on your customers.

Playing the Inner Game

In the context of these global and marketplace challenges, execu-
tives must devise and implement strategies for successfully achiev-
ing their company goals. Complicating the achievement of these
strategies is a series of internal execution challenges common to
many large organizations. Leading salespeople today know this.
They don’t waste time describing to executives the features and
benefits of the products and services they sell. Instead, they get the
executive’s ear by explaining how their products and services will
help the customer surmount its execution challenges. That is crit-
ical to selling value in today’s world. Four major categories define
execution challenges today.

First, companies are challenged to renew and intensify their

focus on the customer. These execution challenges emphasize
improving customer satisfaction and loyalty.

“Customer service obviously is the key to account retention,”

an executive from a telecom manufacturer told us during our
study of strategic purchases by executives. “It drives word-of-
mouth advertising and leads to reorders and existing account
expansion. In this economy, it’s much easier—vital, in fact—to
have continued business from existing customers. The time and
cost to develop new customers is now so long that you could be
out of business before you are done.”

18

Understand